White House

A bipartisan group of 16 lawmakers has introduced legislation that aims to guard against rival governments exploiting the U.S. research system. The bill has met with mixed reactions in the academic community, with some arguing the scope of certain provisions could have a chilling effect on international exchanges.

President Trump’s suspension of wide swaths of visa programs through the end of the year has drawn an outcry from universities and businesses, especially given the inclusion of H-1B visas granted to highly skilled workers.

The U.S. is developing a national strategy for Earth system predictability research that will focus on ways to better understand the practical limits of predictions and increase their usefulness for decision-makers.

A new presidential proclamation bars entry to the U.S. for many Chinese graduate students and visiting researchers if they have ever been connected to Chinese institutions deemed to have military ties. The move comes as even stricter limits on Chinese nationals studying or conducting research in STEM fields are being proposed in Congress.

Responses to the White House’s request for input on options for increasing public access to research outputs run the gamut from denouncing the prospect of government intervention in the publishing sector to calling for a new paradigm that offers immediate free access to papers.

Amid political efforts to implicate the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the COVID-19 pandemic, NIH has terminated a grant for coronavirus research that funded collaborative work with the institute. Separately, scientific societies have condemned attempts to ascribe blame for the pandemic, warning of the rising threat of racist attacks on people of Asian background.

With the White House’s early response drawing broad criticism, top government officials are scrambling to mobilize scientific expertise and resources to blunt the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.

The National Science Foundation has agreed to recommendations from the JASON advisory group on ways to guard against foreign governments exploiting the U.S. research system.

With word of a potential open access executive order reverberating across the scientific community, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is seeking further stakeholder input as it moves to increase public access to research results.

New policy proposals circulating in Congress and floated on the campaign trail suggest that politicians in both parties have an appetite for significantly increasing federal R&D spending.